


Dark Before Dawn

by pinkolifant



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-08 00:39:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17376209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkolifant/pseuds/pinkolifant
Summary: BBB drabble. Don't expect too much.





	1. Chapter 1

It gives way before you. The fire. Making room. Flexing like the muscles of the vanquished opponent.

Your rage is too great.

The world is small, burnt. The strongwine is you, speaking for you.

“Enough,” you say, you walk away. You don’t know where.

The streets. With all the burning. The houses. The fort. Red like blood.

You need to go home. You don’t have it. You’ve never had one.

Or maybe you did, but you don’t remember.

The men scream. The city is in flames. The ships. The water. How could a water ever burn? Yet it does. You run, pressing your ears with both hands. No one looks at you and your cowardice.

You don’t stop until you climbed a zillion steps to a chamber where at least the bed linen smells differently. You inhale it and you try hard to forget the scent of all the burning.

It stings.

It hurts.

It passes, like everything, like your exhaustion, once you wake up.

“Why are you here?” she asks and you don’t know.

You can’t muster the hatred needed to give her an honest answer.

You want to go away from all the burning, it’s all you know.

She doesn't.

She fears you.

She’s too stupid to understand.

She has no clue.

There’s blood on your face, your armour.

It isn’t yours.

Does she know that?

Should you tell her?

Did Joff kiss her?

Should you?

You want to.

Like she wants to run away.

You know that she does.

So what do you do when she closes her eyes, dreaming of another to bestow that kiss upon her innocent figure?

Do you crumble?

Do you threaten her?

Do you kill her?

Do you just pass out and fall asleep?

You’re scaring her, that much ‘s for certain.

“One kiss,” you say, pleading. The voice is not yours. It belongs to the night, to the burning.

She’s in your arms. You can do anything. She shivers, and you know your power to be an illusion. You will never exercise it. Will you? You don’t know. You fear to answer yourself either way.

There’s a song of a fool and his cunt. You want to hear it. She refuses.

You hold that knife on her throat.

For eternal time.

At some point you remove it, and you have your answer, hating it either way. Hating yourself, hating her, hating the world most of all.

You turn to walk away for what else could you do? You hear the sound of her relieved breathing.

You return. You remember that this isn’t about kissing. This is about burning. You burn. Inside and out. You always have. You could not stop yourself from burning. You could not become deaf and mute to the world, cruel as it was. You could not.

“Sansa,” you say.

She’s crying.

“I’m sorry,” you say, you finally drop that bloody knife.

You hug her knees.

“I’m fucking sorry,” you say. You don’t know for what, but you are sorry. For yourself, for her, for the world.

They killed her father, the bloody bastard. They haven’t killed her yet, or you.

“Why are you here?” she asks again.

You answer truthfully, “Because I have nowhere else go go.”

“Oh,” she says, mulling over your answer, beginning to look at _you_ as if you were the Knight of Flowers.

Is that how little it takes? You can’t believe it.

“I have a home,” she says.

“It’s ruined by now,” you say stubbornly. You have heard tidings from the war. Some bannermen betrayed the Starks. Skinned the surviving brothers to death. They have Winterfell now.

“Is it?” she wonders, never losing the hope in her voice, her posture.

You’ve lost hope long ago.

It is what it is. Life.

There is no home.

Just a continuation to a pointless existence.

“There are the summer snows,” she says. “Can they ruin them as well? Or will they continue to fall? Until the mankind ceases to exist and the world ends...”

“I don’t know,” you say and you hold her in your arms, hating the fact that you’re wearing armour.

She doesn’t squirm, she nests.

‘My lord,” she says, finding her position in your morose embrace. “Should you not be protecting the king?”

“The king can go fuck himself,” you say and she flinches.

But your arms don’t let her go. Not now that you dared. You have to try your luck. “I’m sorry,” you repeat and you mean it, for once.

You discover that when you’ve said it once it’s easy to say it again. Over and over again.

“I want to sleep and see the dawn of the new day,” she says. “I want to swear allegiance to Stannis or continue in my Lannister nightmare. But at least there will be light.”

“Will it?” you doubt the nature, you don’t know.

“Come morning, there has to be,” she says with such conviction that even you, with your past, you have to believe it.

And you want to see it, that morning, far away from this city, leagues away from Stannis and the Lannisters.

Your employment has limits. You’ve reached them now.

“Would you like to see the dawn in the kingswood?” you offer. “There will be bright sun through dappled green leaves.

“And birds singing?” she asks childishly.

Does she mean herself? Or the chirping feathery things saluting the new day.

“Dunnow,” you say. “We go and see?|

She looks fearlessly into your eyes. She’s too young.

“I had _never_ thought…” she says effusively. “You said you were a killer. That’s not all you are, is it?”

“What?” your voice is almost pretty, smooth, disguising its own taste of burning. You are on your best behaviour. You don’t dare understand her. You smooth that chunk of lank hair over your bloody scars so that she would see less of them. You’re grateful for the night.

“I thought you _hated_ me,” she breathes out.

“I do,” you concur, but your lips laugh and your eyes laugh and your body laughs, “when I do not love you, my lady.”

She freezes.

“Oh,” she says, digesting the gaping depth in your words. There is nothing that could have prepared her for it. She digests it anyway, like the sword that cut her father’s head.

From the need to do so or sheer desperation.

She’s so calm and cold in your arms.

Your arms drop, betrayed, disappointed. “I’m leaving,” you announce curtly. You can’t stand it to be here any longer, you’ve made a fool of yourself.

_Enough._

She doesn’t move an inch, lingering in the proximity of your useless, sad arms. “Do you?” she asks, “Love me?” her voice is oddly smooth. “Convince me,” she challenges you.

You try to remember the song of the fool and his cunt, but your thoughts and your words betray you. You slur and can’t talk and much less sing. All that wine. You murmur something that sounds vaguely like Florian's chant.

Florian, Florian, Florian the Fool.

She laughs cautiously. “It’s not what I expected,” she shares with ice in her voice, but also honesty, as if she were some peasant girl.

But she isn’t.

She’s a proper princess, she is.

“I have a home,” she insists.

You know. She wants a guard, a man who would take her to it. It’s what you should have offered, what you should do even now. It’s not what you dream of.

Your arms are back on her, and she has never departed from your embrace, and now she’s less jittery, older, more what you need and less what you thought she was. Less what you blamed her for. She was never stupid, was she?

You were, maybe.

Her face turns away from yours and here you risk it, you pinch her chin, gently for a change, and you bestow the tiniest of kisses on a set of perfect lips.

Immaculate cheeks burn.

 _You_ burn and it’s all you can do to stop yourself.

Her hands are around your neck, her sighs are in your ears. You kiss her as you always dreamt you might kiss a woman. Your tears fall, as do hers, slowly.

The night is dark, ending.

The fires have consumed themselves.

Dawn will not tardy.


	2. Chapter 2

Daylight is very faint yet it is there, she sees it, he sees it: the darkness receding.

Cheers resound under her window, cries of celebration and deliverance.

The battle is over, but they are still in the Red Keep, not in the Kingswood as she had dared hope.

Joffrey is still king.

“Should you not leave?” she asks, nearly adds my lord, decides not to. The propriety seems terribly improper.

Almost an insult.

Was that how he had felt after the Hand’s tourney with regard to her courtesies?

“Too late for that,” he rasps.

For what precisely? To leave her or to leave with her? She hopes he means the former and not only the latter, which she can see herself. She doesn’t dare ask.

But what else is he to do? Or she? The opportunity for escape is wasted. She continues to be the king’s betrothed and he… his dog.

That last thought hurts in her throat, in her lungs. It is not just. She never approved of a loyal retainer being treated like an animal, and now she cannot go back on what she feels, cannot hush her heart.

She will lie to Joffrey, but not to herself. She might want to deceive herself to make the pretence easier. Maybe she will resort to it come evening.

But right now the truth in her is so great that it can’t be denied.

Her heart has woken, uninvited, as it has never done before.

Despite the grandeur of her feelings, in the soft greyness of the early morning, they also embarrass her. They are too new, too unspeakable. She can’t help but blush again from her fresh, precious memories.  She feels so warm that she doesn’t mind the cold proximity of his armour. His left hand is even warmer than her face. Bare and huge, it resides gingerly on the small of her back.

She can’t believe that her hands had been wrapped around his neck, hugging his poor, mangled face next to hers, young and pretty.

In the daylight, the truth feels like something she had only dreamed about and which couldn’t have happened. But it had.

In the daylight, he looks uglier than ever, yet it means nothing for what is in her heart.

There’s no hatred in his eyes. No solid, stubborn anger.

She wonders if he might be blushing as well under his scars and his beard. She concludes that he is not. Why would he? He’s a man grown and has already spoken to her with knowledge she’s lacking. About man needing wine. _Or a woman._ She was warned against the wine and taught about marriage by Septa Mordane. She was told nothing about needing a man and if it was proper or not in any circumstance.

Her heart jumps, races, rejoices. A smile is on her lips, pushing through her embarrassment.

In the daylight, it seems ridiculous to give in to what she feels. He might have the same difficulty for he is cold and distant, cautiously seated next to her on her bed.

Was it the night, the fear, the battle that made it so easy and natural to follow her heart without thinking?

Or was it ages ago that he had kissed her? He surely doesn’t attempt to do it again. He blinks and looks through the window, crestfallen, beaten, older than she knows him.

They have been kissing like mad and they must have fallen asleep.

And then, just like that, daylight came.

She breaks her arms, desperate. Summons won’t tardy. She should perhaps change attire, make herself presentable for the court.

She recaptures the courage necessary to look into his eyes and when she does that, she can’t stop.

His lips curl slightly in an ugly grin. Her hands are in his hair again, not afraid of dawn. His hair is soft and smooth around her fingers, his scalp very warm.

“Here’s a pretty for you, you can’t miss it now, can you?” he teases her in a deep, breaking voice so close to her lips, and lowers his eyes. “Might be your father’s head on a spike was a poorer sight, but Gregor’s courtesies come close.”

It costs him, she can see, to admit that he looks even uglier now than he did in darkness and candle light. It pains him so much that she can almost forgive him the cruel mention of her poor Father.

Now that she’s looking at him without him forcing her to do so, he’s behaving as if her gaze belongs to a strict judge who might sentence him to death for a crime he didn’t commit.

She may be embarrassed and young and inexperienced, but it isn’t what she feels for him or about this young, pale morning. She feels that she wants to kiss him, but lacks the daring and the knowledge. All her bravery is required to keep looking and not falter from his gaze which is so intense that it feels as if he were peeling off layers from her soul. She can’t possibly give him any ground to recede like the darkness into some hole of himself where he’s hiding his person, and leave her alone once more.

She hope that maybe he would kiss her now, or hum Florian and Jonquil again, but he never does.

Maybe it’s too much for him as well: to initiate any form of intimacy without the cover of darkness.

The fool, Ser Dontos, bangs at her door. She’s tempted to hide under her bed. She doesn’t. She pushes the Hound there for he would surely be too bulky and noticeable behind her heavy curtains, and he wouldn’t fit in her chest. There’s no other hiding place available.

Ser Dontos is drunk. An emotional praise of the brave knights that Sansa had never seen follows. She’s relieved that the city has not fallen and that there was no plunder and rape Cersei had described to her, or not as much. But she doesn’t admire the knights who saved King’s Landing. How can she?

Their banners are not hers.

With Ser Dontos gone, the Hound scrambles out from under her bed. Bright sunshine on the eastern horizon makes his features sharp. Red and sharply drawn, the lines of scar tissue zig-zag over his cheek.

She wishes to cry and can’t. For him, for her, for everything.

He will have to leave if she is to change and go to court.

She opens her chest to find a clean attire. “It is better if I go than if he sends for me again.”

The second time, it wouldn’t be Dontos, but Kingsguard, for certain. If Ser Aerys was occupied and Ser Boros or Ser Meryn. She would have more bruises on her body, perhaps a new blue spot on her face.

He nods knowingly. “If I was a brave knight,” he rasps sardonically, “I would offer to spirit you away immediately.”

She doesn’t know if he’s teasing her.

“But the dog knows that the night gives him a better chance.”

She has survived so many appearances in court. What is one more? She still fears that Joffrey would see it on her, that she has found an escape. That she is happy where in his opinion she should be suffering like a traitor. Then he would imprison her in a tower and never let her back to her room.

“Won’t you come with me?” she dares. The Hound’s presence would help her to say the good things and return from Court sooner.

“I deserted,” he clarifies bluntly what he had already hinted at in many words last night, and she freezes.

The penalty for that crime is death and he has confessed it so calmly.

He goes back under the bed. “I’ll sleep here,” he says with finality. “We will leave when you return.”

It’s not very brave or very knightly from him to let her face Joff on her own, but it’s what he can do under the circumstances, she realises. Hide and rest until the darkness returns.

“What if he sees?” she blurts “If he locks me away?”

“I’ll find you,” he says simply and means it.

His eyes promise death, not to her.

His expression is cold and even more frightening than usual.

She wants that other look in his eyes, the simple and honest one. She longs for it like she might yearn for water on a summer day.

Her shoulders slump from the weight of her upcoming task. She will surely fail and remain a prisoner of the crown. She’s still the weak and stupid Sansa.

“And when you find me, what will you do?” she hears herself saying.

“We’ll leave, I just told you.”

Further words escape her like rain can’t stay in the sky when the clouds close on it. “I need to feel that this is true before I go to court,” she announces simply.

He remains silent.

“This isn’t some game,” he rumbles with disappointment. “How can I prove anything to you right now? By kidnapping you in the middle of the day? We wouldn’t go far.”

“No, not a game,” Sansa agrees. He was proving everything to her last night before they both fell asleep. Why can’t he give her a tiny bit of reassurance she needs right now? Why can’t he understand her hints? She finds herself utterly unable to crawl under the bed with him and entice him into kissing her. Maybe even kiss him first if he would remain blind to any form of more subtle encouragement.

She curses and loves the daylight and his stubbornness.

_Kiss me again, won’t you?_

He stays put under her bed and looks away.


	3. Three

**Three**

You lay sleepless under her bed.

A dumb idea, to get under it. Yet you did. From below, you behold the rebel feathers sticking out of her mattress, sneaking through the bars of the heavy iron frame.

She's just a prisoner. But her bed remains royal.

Good for her. You were in it. A lighter structure would have given way under your armour, crushed onto the floor rushes. Your own bed is even more solid, now in the tower of the Kingsguard. Your mattress is hard straw, unlike hers, more like the floor you are now laying on.

Will anyone else come here? Reestablishing order will take some time. For all you know, no one will enter before she does. You could crawl out, lay in her bed again. It would be much softer.

Well, in your head. It’s not like you can feel the comfort of the featherbed through your armour.

Except with your hands, your face. You’ve tasted her lips. You touched her neck, her hair.

You laugh like the arse you are. She hasn’t got a clue about what she has gotten into, has she?

It unhinges you to think that perhaps she has.

A silky sheet is blown up and it begins to hang loose near your face, dangling from your barking breath or maybe due to breeze. She forgot to close her window. It remains open to the pale, hopeful morning. You think of her as you smell it, and the reek of blood.  _ Your  _ blood.

You’re the remaining battle grime in her chamber.

A ray of sunshine passes over your armoured belly, like a sword cutting you in two.

Your own weapons are useless, discarded, stuck between you and the wall.

You weep as suddenly as you had laughed, hysteric like an old hag, grunting at occasions.

Her kisses.

It’s too much what you have gotten.

It’s too little.

The door opens, the maids enter, chatting and chuckling.

You stifle your pathetic sobs. You lay attentive. The Hound. Watchful.

“Ewww!” One girl doesn’t hide what her nose is telling her. The Lorathi one who also serves the Imp. In different ways. There were times when you pondered finding such woman. Paying her to not flinch. You always gave up. It seemed more honest to spot disgust on a different face come morning. Or, better even, be done in the night. Drink after, to the arrival of the new day. Miss the dawn, and sleep in, if it’s you beloved brothers’ turn to guard the king. Return to your duty when it is time.

Give a rat’s arse for anything else.

“Lady Sansa’s moonblood is very strong,” the other serving girl responds insipidly. “She will give the king many strong sons and beautiful daughters.” 

You almost spit out your most derisive laugh.

Almost, but just not quite.

You’re always in control. Even when the wine has you.

You’re quiet like a tomb.

The day has you now. You’ve seen its arrival. You could not miss it. There is no duty to return to.

The girls have no buckets or mops. Only bed linen. They’ll change it and leave. You won’t kill them.

“It still stinks,” the Lorathi one concludes when they are done.

She isn’t wrong.

Both your armour and you should be scrubbed clean from blood and worse.

“The city is smouldering,” the other one whispers, “the stench will stay with us for days.” Possibly she is not as stupid as you thought. Just young and frightened and repeating the wisdoms taught to maids.

Today you almost like people better than dogs.

The Imp’s concubine takes a deep breath and looks around. “It’s as if there were a corpse in here.”

The gore is on you, your armour. For a moment you think she’ll look under the bed, see you.

She does not.

You’re left alone. Your head resounds like a belltower after a prayer to the Seven. A searing pain pulsates behind your left eye. You want water. There isn’t any. The service in the Red Keep is lacking. Good. No one will find you.

The thirst might kill you though.

Not the thirst, your buggering liar.

The waiting.

You’re waiting all the same.

She must come back, right?

Will Joff let her?

Does she want to?

You dare think she might. The memory is in your head, on your lips. The sweetest thing that has ever been.

It has to mean something.

Right, that you’re a fool who wasted the unique opportunity to leave by falling asleep. You could have taken her and yourself half way to the riverlands by now.

You have done nothing. You’re still here, under her bloody bed changed clean, smelling of soap and roses.

When the solitary sun beam on your stomach wanders off and transforms into a pond of light in the middle of her chamber, you’re seized by doubt. She’ll never come back. Why would she? She can’t want that. How could she? What woman would return to you? She deceived you because she had to, like she tricks Joff every day.

Stop.

Stop.

Stop.

You’re a buggering fool.

No one has kissed you like that.

She’s a piss poor liar. You would have gotten a whiff if it was all an act. It would have been less messy and more courteous from her side, you guess. But then, she still  _ was _ courteous, kind of. Even in your arms. Even in the wildest of kisses. Must be just her. What she is. Can’t be otherwise, lying or telling the truth.

In court even Joffrey knows she’s lying and he’s taking his sweet time to force her to lie some more and gloat in her misery.

You tell yourself he’ll be like a peacock in court the whole day today, savouring someone else’s victory as if it was his own. No one will be allowed to eat, drink or rest before their king is done celebrating. You’ve seen it before.

You don’t know what Sansa wants to do or what she’d be allowed to do. You’ve got to wait.

Knowing what you should do helps shit to order your spirit.

You wait all the same.

Because you want to see her and the closest thing to a certainty that you would get to see her tonight is staying here, under her bed. Cersei wanted her to have these quarters in Maegor, thinking them well guarded. You snort at that. Little bird has run out more than once. To the godswood. To the roof. Away from the asphyxiating heat and the Lannisters.

She has met you more than once and you acted like a dumbass. You could not let her see.

Now she must know alright.

You told her yourself, didn’t you?

Heat creeps into your face and you burn from within.

You could not have told her, could you?

You don’t remember, but you think you  _ might _ have told her  you loved her.

Your face is in flames and you’ve never felt more miserable.

The bells of the Great Sept of Baelor toll harder than when King Robert had died.

It’s noon.

You’ll die waiting. Or from shame. Like a maid you’ve never been.

You laugh at yourself, your stupidity.

You imagine her begging for a different set of quarters so that she wouldn’t have to go back to you, suffer your attention, your kisses.

Your head is pounding and there’s nothing you can do.

Your strong arms are useless. You could not even take off the bloody armour without help because of grime. It matters not. You can’t get it off. You’ll need it to break out of the palace should she still want to leave with you.

The monumentality of the notion that she might rocks you harder than your pathetic shame over confessing your love.

So what? You’ve told her the truth. Not the first one, not the last one. She’ll have to deal with it, like with all others.

Her father’s head on spike, the greatest truth of all.

She knows about you now. She can step on your heart or take it. Shame gives way to lightness. You feel empty, and alleviated. She knows.

She couldn’t stop kissing you.

The day is bright, sunny.

One of the last long days of the Long Summer.

Everlasting.

Why isn’t she coming back? Joff could have retired to digest his midday meal and victory by now. Perhaps Cersei has given him wine to make him feel stronger.

You know she probably can’t come back. You’re terribly impatient just the same.

You plot the way out of the Red Keep at night. The positions of the guards, the rounds. You know them. Your high treason is common knowledge by now. You plan your kills. Rapid and clean. You hope that Stranger survived. You ought to find him loose, lurking in the stables, where he would have returned for food. You don’t think any of the stable boys was able to tie him up.

You haven’t eaten. But you aren’t hungry. Just thirsty and with headache, and heartsick.

In bright sunlight, you sleep.

(It has taken all strength of your will to stop your head from turning and do what used to be the easiest thing of all.)

Slide into oblivion.

In the end of the afternoon, it rains softly.

Like your tears, like hers.

Is it autumn now?

Gods, do you love her.

  
  
  
  



End file.
